The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and
Big Government Will Shape America’s Future
By Arthur C. Brooks
(Basic Books, 163 pages, $23.95)
The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, war
weariness, Republican sleaze and in-eptitude, a magnetic Democratic
presidential candidate, a supine press: all of these aligned in
2008 to bring the left to power and give it an unprecedented
opportunity to transform the United States into a European-style
nannyocracy. What will happen if it succeeds — and how to keep
that from happening — are the themes of Arthur Brooks’s
The Battle, a fierce and necessary manifesto for the
renewal of a common-sense right. “America today faces a cultural
struggle,” Brooks’s first lines warn. “This is not the ‘culture
war’ of the 1990s. This is not a fight over guns, abortions,
religion, and gays. Nor is it about Republicans versus Democrats.
Rather, it is a struggle between two competing visions of America’s
future.”
Brooks, an economist and the recently appointed president of the
American Enterprise Insti-tute, is a data master with a popular
touch. His first data point sets the stage for the rest of his
argument. “Whether we look at capitalism, taxes, business, or
government,” he writes, “the data show a clear and consistent
pattern: 70 percent of Americans support the free enterprise system
and are unsupportive of big government. By contrast, somewhere
between 20 and 30 percent of the adult population opposes free
enterprise and prefers government solutions to our problems.”
America is thus “the 70-30 nation.” The country’s economic downturn
hasn’t really budged these numbers, Brooks points out. Recent
polling data show around 70 percent of Americans approving of the
“free market” and 75 percent having a negative image of the
“government regulation of business.” Small businesses enjoy a 95
percent approval rate. These attitudes, deeply rooted in American
history, separate the U.S. from Europe’s democracies, which are
much friendlier to activist government and more suspicious of
capitalism.
The 30-percent coalition now running the country, more European
than American in sensibility and values, breaks down into leaders
and followers, Brooks explains. The leaders are America’s cultural
elite, so they possess disproportionate power. They make oodles of
money, usually go to grad school, and tend to work in law,
education, journalism, and entertainment. While other elites
(engineers and bankers, for instance) and middle- and working-class
voters have been trending conservative since the '70s, this
“intellectual upper class” has become steadily more statist and
left-wing. And President Barack Obama and his coterie of advisers
are the leaders of the leaders.
Who are the followers? They include a few geographic enclaves
like San Francisco (where 64 percent of adults call themselves
liberal, compared with just 29 percent nationwide), blacks,
Hispanics, municipal workers, and young people. Younger Americans,
some surveys have shown, are even expressing a bit of sympathy for
socialism. This is a new development — the under-30 crowd had been
moving rightward on many issues until the mid-2000s or so — and
how much it results from Obama’s youthful charisma remains unclear.
But Brooks is right to worry: “This is not just a fifth of the
adult population: It is the future of the country.”
And as The Battle describes, the left wants to hold on
to these young supporters by making their long-term interests align
with those of big government. No wonder the Obama administration
has proposed to pay off student loans for college grads who go to
work for the government or nonprofits (many of which depend on
government funds) for 10 years. After Obama’s tax changes and
enormous stimulus, moreover, the proportion of Americans who pay no
federal taxes will near 50 percent. When the non-payers outnumber
the payers, most Americans will then “have no economic incentive to
defend free enterprise, because it is so far from their interest to
do so.” Capture the young and create a majority of tax eaters with
no “skin in the game,” as Brooks puts it, and you’ve built a
formidable political machine to expand government.
The 30-percent minority won power partly because it took the
moral high ground and imposed its interpretation of the financial
crisis, Brooks maintains. The “Obama narrative” blames not the
government but greedy bankers and supposedly unregulated markets
for the financial meltdown and economic crash, contends that the
crisis can be solved through massive government growth and deficit
spending, asserts that Main Street Americans were blameless
victims, and insists that “the rich” can pay for the entire
stimulus. Brooks disputes each of these points with admirable
economy, explaining, for example, how Republican and Democratic
administra-tions alike pushed lenders to offer mortgages to
high-risk, low-income borrowers, dangerously inflating the housing
bubble, and noting how many mortgage-seekers falsified information
when applying for their loans. The economic research, he observes,
casts doubt on the efficacy of Keynesian prime-the-pump spending.
That the wealthy will somehow be able to pay for all the new debt
that the Obama administration is piling on is laughable.
YET DESPITE THE OBAMA narrative’s intellectual lameness, the
left has worked, with at least some success, to leverage it into “a
game-changer” for American culture and society. After all, we now
have budget-busting ObamaCare, Government Motors, new union
protections, an FCC trying to increase its regulatory control of
the Internet-and much more bad policy is on the horizon, including
harshly redistributive taxation, if the right can’t bring a quick
conclusion to the Age of Obama this November and in 2012. The Obama
“end game” looks something like this, Brooks says: “We will have
bigger bureaucracies, bigger labor unions, and bigger state-run
corporations. It will be harder to be an entrepreneur because of
punitive taxes and regulations. The rewards of success will be
expropriated for the sake of attaining greater income equality.”
America will be less able to attract the top talent. It will be
less of a “gift to the world.” Friedrich Hayek’s warnings about a
road to serfdom seem scarily relevant.
To prevent this denouement, the friends of free enterprise — of
freedom — not only must reclaim the narrative of the crisis, but
they must also reclaim the moral high ground from the left. This is
the crucial battle of Brooks’s title. “More than any other system,”
Brooks says, the free market society “is not just an economic
alternative but a moral imperative.” It beats the
competition not just for efficiency but for fairness and justice.
The 70-percent majority needs its politicians and advocates to get
this point and argue for it. If they can’t or won’t, the 30 percent
coalition will keep winning battles it shouldn’t be winning — and
eventually become a statist majority.
The forces of freedom have an important ally in the battle:
human nature. The left thinks that “spreading the wealth around,”
as Obama would say, will make society more just and people happier.
But this attitude misunderstands the human heart, Brooks explains,
reprising and updating the argument he made in his earlier
Gross National Happiness. The data show that inequality
doesn’t really bother us; what frustrates the spirit is closing the
opportunities for earned success. The sense of meaningful
achievement that accompanies earned success — doing a job well,
setting down and completing a project, exerting control over one’s
life and future — makes us happy in profound and lasting ways.
This “is the liberty our founders wrote about, the liberty
that enables the true pursuit of happiness,” Brooks says.
And here the freedom agenda easily beats the com-petition, since it
opens myriad possibilities for people to succeed through hard work
and merit and talent and luck. The left’s redistributionist agenda
— far more materialistic than the supposedly greedy right’s —
winnows possibilities; resentment invariably festers.
The Battle clearly began life when the right’s
prospects looked grim and publishers were rushing out books with
titles like The Death of Conservatism and 40 More
Years: How Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation. A year and
a half of liberal rule has reminded many Americans why they don’t
like the left. From the extraordinary Tea Party rallies against big
government and vertigo-inducing debt to the mounting anger about
cushy pension deals for public sector unions to the plummeting
approval ratings of the president and the Democratic Congress, the
70-percent majority is fighting back. Even some young Obamaphiles
seem to be having second thoughts: only about half of young voters
are planning to go Democratic in upcoming House races, a Gallup
poll reports, down from six out of 10 in 2006. (Brooks is no party
man, it’s worth adding: he harshly condemns Republicans of the Bush
years for their awful earmarks, bloated federal budgets,
incompetence, and corruption.)
Brooks steers mostly clear of foreign policy and the social
issues. The most urgent conflict right now, one that should bring
all conservatives together — and in this, The Battle
reads like a 21st-century Frank Meyer, a reborn fusionism — is
keeping the Obama/Pelosi left from radically remaking America into
a social democracy. That way lies not dynamism and growth but
social poison and sclerotic decay.
